Two New Devices Offer National Instruments M Series DAQ Technology on the Latest Plug-In PC Bus

National Instruments releases the industry's first PC-based multifunction data acquisition (DAQ) devices for PCI Express. The new NI PCIe-6251 and NI PCIe-6259 DAQ devices combine the high-performance PCI Express bus with the technology advancements of National Instruments M Series DAQ to offer engineers and scientists fast analog and digital I/O with the dedicated per-slot bandwidth of PCI Express. The new devices feature up to 32 analog channels with 16 bit, 1.25 MS/s sampling speed and 10 MHz digital I/O on up to 32 lines.

"National Instruments is helping drive the adoption of PCI Express bus technology in the measurement and automation market with this announcement of the industry's first PCI Express multifunction data acquisition devices to complement our existing PCI Express products for image acquisition, GPIB and remote control of PXI systems with MXI-Express," said Tim Dehne, NI senior vice president of R&D. "PCI Express provides dedicated, high speed bandwidth for measurement devices, while also delivering software compatibility with existing PCI products. This combination opens up new applications for virtual instrumentation and continues to take advantage of the high performance and low cost of PC technology."

PCI Express is a high-performance, point-to-point serial interconnect with a scalable architecture that provides bandwidth from two to 30 times that of traditional PCI. The NI PCIe-6251 and NI PCIe-6259 devices use a x1 ("by one") PCI Express connector that provides 250 MB/s bandwidth per device. In addition, these and other PCI Express devices from NI are completely software-compatible with traditional PCI, helping both vendors and users preserve their investments in existing driver and application software.

As with other NI M Series DAQ devices, the new NI PCIe-6251 and NI PCIe-6259 DAQ devices feature the NI-STC 2 system controller, the NI-PGIA 2 amplifier and NI-MCal calibration technology for increased performance, accuracy and I/O. The two new devices are part of the high-speed M Series family, offering up to 32 analog input channels with 16-bit, 1.25 MS/s sampling speed; up to four analog output channels with 16-bit, 2.8 MS/s sampling speed and 32 high-speed digital I/O (DIO) channels with 10 MHz sampling speed. The devices also include additional static DIO lines and two 32-bit counter/timers.

The new PCI Express M Series multifunction data acquisition devices include time-saving NI measurement services software, including NI-DAQmx driver software and VI Logger Lite data-logging software. In addition, all examples and applications originally written for PCI-based M Series devices are fully compatible with their new PCI Express counterparts.